City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton (novels to read .txt) 📗

was the only Anglo there and unable to take communion because I wasn’t a Catholic. But my Spanish was good enough to be part of the responses to the priests. My Latin stank.

Then she went with me to the service at Central Methodist, M.E.-South, listening to me sing in the choir. As usual, she was the only Mexican American in the pews, but she was welcome to take communion in our “heathen Protestant” church, as she playfully called it, and did so.

Don could believe what he wanted, but this comforted me beyond the singing: The Apostles’ Creed, Doxology, Lord’s Prayer, and especially words of forgiveness. I needed the last one. Did I kill anybody over there? You bet—I killed over here, too, and I felt rotten about it, “Hero Hammons Brothers” notwithstanding. Why did the ringleader pick that moment to appear with a gun? And just like during the war, it was kill or be killed. I prayed for the souls of the ones whose lives I had ended, prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for Victoria and for Don. This was not an only-Sunday thing.

After I made it through the war and the Spanish flu, I stopped asking God anything for me. The Lord’s Prayer said, “Thy will be done.” That was a tough surrender. After the service, we went to brunch.

“You’re brooding, Eugene,” she said.

“You caught me.”

She placed her hand on mine. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Her family liked me. This was especially true after ’31, when Herbert Hoover’s Mexican deportation—an effort to lessen the number of job seekers in a free-falling economy—swept up American citizens. Among them was Victoria’s brother Feliciano. I went to Nogales and brought him back across the border, pretending he was my prisoner.

The Vasquez family had been in Phoenix for generations, opening a dry goods store in 1884. And they gave me their undying gratitude for saving Feliciano. Whether that would extend to giving me their daughter’s hand in marriage was another matter. Her parents were traditional, and I’m sure imagined Victoria married to a handsome Mexican American and having beautiful Mexican American children.

They wouldn’t have understood our relationship. I’m not sure I did. She was twenty-eight, well beyond the age of marriage in her community, even in the Anglo world, the postwar revolution in morals notwithstanding. Maybe they would welcome this Anglo preventing their daughter from becoming una solterona. She was far from an old maid in my mind, of course. And she had a career as a photographer. When was I going to make Victoria an “honest woman”? I didn’t know. It was complicated.

* * *

On Monday, I enjoyed breakfast as usual at the Saratoga and got into work at nine. Gladys was at her Remington, hammering out the report I had dictated last week—my findings on Gus Greenbaum for Kemper Marley. It wasn’t worth five hundred dollars. Short answer: Chicago organized crime was nesting in Phoenix. Greenbaum had an office in the Luhrs Tower, probably holding his bulky wire service equipment, too. Prohibition had been bad in so many ways, not least because it had provided additional rackets for the mob. Now they were looking for new ways to make money once liquor was legal again.

It was rich that Marley feigned outrage, considering his soon-to-be-legal booze empire was seeded by Al Capone’s organization. And his indignation wasn’t about lawbreaking—only that he wasn’t getting his cut of a lucrative new hustle. He wanted leverage against Greenbaum, and I had found none, unless he could out-bribe the local officials, and that threatened his ambitions with the Outfit. It was a dirty business, and I regretted ever taking the case. Once again for Gladys’s amusement, I had to tell the quick version of the gun battle outside the citrus groves. I was sick of it, but Gladys was entranced, for once happy to be working for a private eye as well as a dull accountant. I wished I were a dull accountant.

Inside my private office, the morning mail was waiting for me. Mostly bills, except for one. I used my silver letter opener to slit it open.

The telegram was from Prescott and read:

GENE HAMMONS=

MONIHON BLDG PHOENIX AZ.=

WE WISH TO ENGAGE YOU TO FIND OUR DAUGHTER CARRIE A STUDENT AT ARIZONA STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE. WE HAVE NOT HEARD FROM HER SINCE JAN. 5. PLEASE WIRE YOUR ACCEPTANCE=

EZRA THAYER=

HOTEL ST. MICHAEL PRESCOTT AZ=

A Western Union money order for a hundred dollars was attached.

Usually, I would celebrate the prospect of new business. But I physically backed away from the paper as if it were a live hand grenade. Ezra Thayer’s inquiry might be routine, the kind of thing that was the heart of my PI practice. But I feared the worst: That Carrie was the murdered girl beside the railroad tracks. The homicide that the “Valley of the Sun” bigwigs were trying to conceal.

I put the Republic atop it and scanned the news: “Hitlerite Regime in Prospect,” read the headline on the top left. Marley would be pleased. Communists and Nazis were battling in Berlin’s streets. A prospector had been murdered near Casa Grande and his body thrown down a well. Half a million Chinese troops were trying to eject the Japanese from Manchuria without success.

Only after smoking an entire Chesterfield and slowly walking twice around the office did I sit back down, reread the telegram, compose a response, and call Gladys on the intercom to summon a Western Union boy.

* * *

The next day, a Railway Express envelope arrived at my office. Prescott was once the territorial capital and the center of a rich mining district. I asked Thayer to send me a photo of Carrie by train—it was the fastest way. In the meantime, I distracted myself by taking the Greenbaum report down to Kemper Marley at his spread on Fourteenth Avenue near Broadway, south of town. His wife, Ethel, was a charming woman who served us tea and made me wonder how she ended up with a thug like Kemper. I guess no man could